"Sushi tastes amazing. A great steak is just amazing." Those are not the words you expect to hear from a leader of the vegetarian movement. But that's how Graham Hill, founder of the sustainability website TreeHugger, feels about the fleshier components of his diet. He is a self-described "weekday vegetarian," a compromise that came about after years of trying--and failing--to adhere to a strictly vegetarian diet. For the past year, Hill has preached the cause of partial vegetarianism to help ...

One Sunday last fall, Bill Hybels, founder and senior pastor at the Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago's northwest suburbs, was preaching on the logic and power of Jesus' words "Love thine enemy." As is his custom, Hybels was working a small semicircle of easels arrayed behind his lectern, reinforcing key phrases. Hybels' preaching is economical, precise of tone and gesture. Again by custom, he was dressed in black, which accentuated his pale complexion, blue eyes and hair, once Dutch-boy ...

There are higher-yielding varieties of groundnut than those that farmers in Malawi tend to plant, but getting them to switch is tough. Better seed is pricey, increasing their risk. So researchers from the World Bank ran an experiment. With local NGOs, they offered the farmers loans. Some loans even came with a crop-insurance policy: if the season was dry and the yield a dud, the debt would be forgiven. The farmers' risk was lowered. Of farmers offered conventional loans, 33% ...

Most private hospitals can only dream of the futuristic medicine Dr. Divya Shroff practices today. Outside an elderly patient's room, the attending physician gathers her residents around a wireless laptop propped on a mobile cart. Shroff accesses the patient's entire medical history--a stack of paper in most private hospitals. And instead of trekking to the radiology lab to view the latest X-ray, she brings it up on her computer screen. While Shroff is visiting the patient, a resident types ...

Are you furious? If not, you should be. The giant financial institutions that make up Wall Street have been bailed out, thanks to trillions of dollars of our money, and are on track to hand out record-breaking multibillion-dollar bonuses while millions of regular folks are hurting. Even outside the gilded halls of Wall Street, there's no shortage of good cheer: many economists say the Great Recession has ended, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke keeps seeing "green shoots" in ...

Bank of England Governor Mervyn King this week launched a scathing attack on Britain's banking sector, calling for a break-up of behemoth financial institutions that have taken billions of public money to stay afloat. King says Britain's Main Street banks should be separated from their risky investment arms to dissolve a culture in which some banks can fall back on the knowledge that they are "too important to fail" and thus can keep gambling with vast amounts of public cash. ...

Authorities have closed all educational institutions across the county until at least the end of the week, following twin suicide bombings at an Islamic university on Tuesday. By Wednesday, the death toll from the attacks at Islamabad's International Islamic University had climbed to six. Twenty-nine others were wounded, said Naeem Iqbal of the Islamabad police. Watch more about the attacks Officials in the North West Frontier Province, Balochistan and Sindh shuttered their schools and colleges ...

Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson won the Nobel Prize for economics for work on how community institutions can prevent conflict, the Nobel Committee announced Monday. Ostrom becomes the first woman to win the prize in its 40-year history. The award was a "great surprise... I'm still a little bit in shock," she said by phone at the news conference announcing the prize. Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, was praised "for ...

As the leaders of the world's industrial powers gather this week in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, their economies are starting to emerge from the shadow of the worst financial downturn since the Great Depression. A year ago, global markets were in free fall as governments moved to prop them up, sometimes nationalizing financial institutions and automakers. At this year's Group of 20 summit, the leaders will begin looking at an exit strategy for the programs that were considered necessary, but often added ...

Harvard University, one of America's premiere academic institutions, is coming under fire for running an advertisement in its campus newspaper questioning the reality of the Holocaust. Recently named for the second straight year as the No. 1 school in U.S. News & World Report rankings of American colleges, Harvard is known for its rigorous scholarly standards and prestigious reputation. On Tuesday, however, The Harvard Crimson, in what it said was an error, ran the Holocaust-questioning advertisement, which had been rejected ...